My Path To Vim Enlightenment

It’s been about 2 months now since I began using Vim as my full-time editor and I can easily say that my productivity has increased as a result. I’m still only scratching the surface of what the editor can do, but I’m confident that this is going to be one of the single best moves I make in my programming career. Not only will it save me time and money by not trying out every new editor that comes out on the market, but it is a tool that I can use for the rest of my programming career and on any machine I will ever have to code on. I highly recommend integrating Vim into your workflow and hopefully the following resources will make it a lot easier to do so.

I wanted to write and share some of my experiences with the editor, but there are already so many good articles our there I figured I would just share some of the more helpful ones I’ve come across rather than trying to re-invent the wheel. I tried to list the articles in the order I think it would be most beneficial to read them in, but don’t be afraid to jump around or cherry pick through them. Like I said, I’m only scratching the surface with what the editor is capable of so I will make sure to curate this list over time.

An awesome article by Yehuda Katz which talks about his transition to Vim. He lets you know that it’s OK to hangout in insert mode most of the time and stick to your usual editing habits when you’re starting out. This way you can at least continue being productive while trying out the editor so you won’t have to switch back to your old editor if you are feeling pressure of a looming deadline.

Even if you’re not coming from TextMate, this article has some practical advice for getting started with Vim. This article is what got me to fire up vimtutor for the first time which was a great way to start editing some text and getting a glimpse of the power of Vim.

Probably my favorite Vim article I’ve ever read, or at least the one I got the most out of. It has some great advice on learning Vim and covers some incredibly helpful commands. It was also the first time I saw the power of out Vim Macros.